


anyway, my mistake, you spin straw into gold strings.

by sidnihoudini



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Established Relationship, F/M, Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 1297's Cupid Meme.  With a sour, steady look pulling his face in three different directions – he doesn't know which card to play today that will get <i>studious yet recovering</i> across, but then he realizes that they don't know about Zach, nobody will ever know about what happens with Zach – he crosses the street, tugging the hem of his neckline away from his throat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	anyway, my mistake, you spin straw into gold strings.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [1297.livejournal.com](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=1297.livejournal.com).



The Ono inspired teenager who got a job at Rockaway Records right out of middle school knows it. Richard, one of the head buyers at Silverlake Wine, he knows it in the same palpable way he does the difference between Pinot Noir and Grigio. There's a paperback romance novel junkie who heads down to Intelligentsia every day at noon; she probably knows it more than anyone else.

It's overt, in a slap to the face kind of way, when Zach walks down the sidewalk with a grim look on his face, and Noah's leash noodled around his hand.

Chris calls him while he's waiting in line at Y-Que with a late birthday gift he's finally tracked down for his brother, and then, all of a sudden everyone in Y-Que knows it, too, this droning inclination of love that has Zach hot around the collar as he argues with Chris over the phone for no reason at all.

Things are just so easy to turn sour, these days.

.

Elta was hired at Rockaway Records about two weeks through the summer vacation between middle school and high school. To secure the job she'd flirted with the pierced girl who worked the counter at the time, who, in the grand scheme of things, Elta had replaced in the end, with a flick of the wrist and a little black eyeliner on her upper lid.

She'd met Chris Pine before she'd really realized that it was Chris Pine at all, and, over the few months that followed, before school had even been back in session, had come to be a fly on the wall to the overheard highs and lows of a whirlwind romance that sounded as though it was very quickly lumbering towards that gray area that came right after marriage did.

"I'm just, I'm in love, man," He had grinned, googly eyes firmly affixed one of the first few times he'd come in to poke around the record racks. He'd been with a friend of his whom Elta doesn't see around much anymore -- he must have moved out of the area, but at the time they had seemed so close.

The guy had rolled his eyes without much preamble and then looked at Chris sideways, like your mother would. "You're always in love," He'd said. He had been the kind of guy that Elta would take advice from; she believed him, then.

Chris had made a vague facial expression and hand gesture, looking blue eyed and red faced, feet glued to the floor in the very affectation of being in the presence of such a looming monster such as love, and then he'd shrugged his shoulders.

He had always kept Elta very curious, after that.

.

The relationship ends for good a couple of weeks after Joe's birthday.

Zach comes home with the paper, a bag of groceries about to split on the bottom, and a fresh pack of cigarettes. It only takes a second for him to realize that Chris has up and left; the empty cardboard box they'd unpacked the new 52" plasma out of a few weeks ago is suddenly missing from the back porch recycling bin.

So, he throws the newspaper against the wall over the sink, startles Noah into choking his kibble all over the tile when he accidentally knocks the bag of groceries off of the counter, and then sits in a corner chair in the living room, smoking the first half of his cigarettes.

When a looming cloud of smoke begins to hang down a good foot below the ceiling, he decides to relocate with the last half pack, peering through the back door and out into the mysterious sunlight of outside.

How can things be so normal when his moronic other half has decided to leave him, leave them?

The neighbor looks at him mysteriously from the next yard over, watching as he strikes three matches before one actually lights. Zach glowers at him as best he can in the broken open, split apart heart culmination of the biggest love of his life, and, after a few moments of thinking about this, flicks his cigarette butt against the concrete.

It bounces twice, and quickly settles between a crack in the pavement.

.

A year into the relationship, Zach's washing machine had gone berserk and flooded his basement with six and a half inches of water.

Chris had left his shoes upstairs in the kitchen, rolled his jeans up to his shins, and waded around in the back pipe water for half an hour, searching for the water main while Zach flipped through the yellow pages from his perch on the stairs, Noah sitting a step above him, watching as Chris fished around in the gummy water.

After the call was made and there was an appointment for the plumber to come the next day, they'd lugged two of Zach's jersey bags stuffed full of dirty laundry three blocks west, to the corner of Rowena and Hyperion. Zach had driven one of his girlfriends there once, to spy on her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend, and then had provided the moral support after, over a round of martinis at Barbarella.

Zach had regaled the story to Chris as they tried to tug the wedged in laundry bags out of the car trunk; the only other people in the parking lot had been a few lingering hipsters, and an older couple driving a Cadillac who had stopped to kiss in parking spot D.

Inside, Sandra, thirty-something with an untamable mane, had been sitting atop one of the rumbling dryers with her nose in a paperback when they'd managed to bumble through the front doors, each carrying an oversized, awkward bag of laundry.

She'd peered over the edges of the well read paper despite herself.

"Would you help me," Chris garbled, mouth pressed against the fabric of the bag before he accidentally fumbled it and it rolled to the floor, landing with the dull thump of a dead body against the scuffed tiles.

Around them, the whirl of the laundromat rolled on, people with their glasses fallen down to the very tips of their noses far too caught up in feeding quarters and pink liquid soap into their designated machines to care.

"What are you doing? Oh my god," Zach had intoned, trying to reach down to pull the bag back up with one hand. Chris glared at him a little from the corners of his eyes, looking partially winded, and very close to thundering down the dangerous slope of weariness.

Sandra's machine buzzed, killing the steady rumbling underneath her, but before jumping down off of the machine, she'd stolen one last glance at Chris, standing halfway between the door and the first machine with two overstuffed bags at his feet, Zach gone to try and find a laundry cart. He had seemed so overwhelmed, pink high in his cheeks, with irritation dead set in the line of his shoulders.

The little things.

But that had been it, the last look, because by the time she'd slid back down to the floor, and turned around to pop the machine door open, he'd disappeared. Whisked away in a flurry of a laundry cart, and Zach's unwillingness to compete for one of the newer machines.

She hadn't known it, but she had been sole witness to the first day in a long line of last days that would inevitably end up being the thundering, bolt shaking steady demise of two people who, otherwise, had cared for each other just too much.

.

Three photographers are waiting for Chris outside of LAMILL a day after he leaves Zach.

With a sour, steady look pulling his face in three different directions – he doesn't know which card to play today that will get _studious yet recovering_ across, but then he realizes that they don't know about Zach, nobody will ever know about what happens with Zach – he crosses the street, tugging the hem of his neckline away from his throat.

They follow him, one snap for every foot Chris plants on the ground, and, in the middle of the street he realizes, _it wasn't always like this here._

.

The thing about real love, Zach thinks, as he thumbs Chris' phone number into his cellphone, is that it makes you do funny things. Things you wouldn't ever do to another person, especially with your pride on the line.

Below him, Noah sniffs along the line of the sidewalk, searching for that perfect spot that no other dog has found before him, and in doing so tugs Zach a few steps down, towards a seemingly promising fence post.

The thing about love, is –

"This neighborhood isn't the same without you," He tells Chris' voicemail, squinting up into the bright sky, and then looking down as Noah stops sniffing one spot to abruptly sniff the other. "If you snuck off in the middle of the night to teach me a lesson, that's… well. There isn't anything else better than you, so just… gimme a call back, sometime."

The thing about love is that you can't live without it once you find that one good drip, you can't live without it even if you try.

.

Three months into their relationship, namely, halfway through that breathless, dizzy phase that always left Chris with a slight sense of vertigo and no ammo to do anything about it with, they'd ordered a bottle of wine at Café Stella, and, in the warm pocket of a neighborhood that had not truly been theirs until recently, Zach rubbed his hand across his forehead and said, carefully, "I'm pretty sure the entire city of Los Angeles conspired to help me find you."

Chris had laughed suddenly, loud and awkward enough for the few other patrons around them to turn with a slight air to their head as Zach grinned, slow and sure in this wicked way that spread from one corner of his mouth to the other. He had just left Chris sitting there, staring back, wide-eyed and boggled.

"How do you figure that?" He'd finally thought to ask, unable to do anything other than slump back in his seat, and watch the way Zach was still grinning back at him, like there was a secret in the air that Chris was suddenly very close to finding out.

Like Zach had only been waiting for Chris to catch up this whole time.

"Not a decent house to buy in Los Feliz," He'd begun, raising his eyebrows a little at Chris over their table top. "Echo Park, not for me. Mount Washington is full of yuppies, and I don't get the whole Glassell Park craftsman thing."

Unable to help it, Chris' mouth had dropped open a little further in wonder as he raised his eyebrows, voice a little pitchy as he'd replied, "That's all, huh?"

"This Silverlake thing? Just call it a hunch," Zach shrugged, mouth still turning up at the corners, as Chris laughed again, softer this time, and ran a hand through his hair, breathless.

.

"Sorry," Chris tells Zach later that night, when Zach opens the front door to find Chris standing on the stoop, with a six pack of Coronas in one hand and a bag of take out food in the other.

The porch light wobbles in the dark when Chris drops everything accidentally, arms automatically coming up as a reaction of Zach taking a step towards him. The beer drops flat, hard, and fast, landing with a sharp smack against the stoop, but the food hits the step first and then spills in slow motion, walking itself down the stairs and onto the path leading up to the front door.

Same path Chris has walked many times, with Zach and without him.

"Me too," Zach replies, voice sounding rough as he hugs back. It isn't until Chris opens his eyes again that he realizes he had closed them, so he digs his fingers into the warmth of Zach's back a little harder.

Mouth set in a hard line flat against the curve of Chris' shoulder, Zach hugs back, tight, with his eyes out towards the road, the rolling, active span of the neighborhood sprawling out from the end of Zach's yard.

"Come inside," Zach says, finally, after a few quiet moments of standing there in the dim light of the porch, poorly wired light buzzing overhead.

Chris watches his face for a moment, curious at the intensity so obviously there, before he nods, an accidental smile twitching across his lips as he reaches up to scratch the back of his neck, as he says, "Yeah, okay."


End file.
